Fall Guys is the unexpected hit game of summer2020, with players battling their way across endless obstacle courses in a chaotic, wobbly race to the finish. It almost wasn’t so: developer Mediatonic actually didn’t want to make a Battle Royale game. Creative director Jeff Tanton actually forbade his team from pitching these kinds of games, feeling that the market was oversaturated. So why did the team decide to break their own rule and develop Fall Guys, and how did it end up taking the world by storm? Mediatonic was first founded by a pair of drunks at Brunel University. Dave Bailey and Paul Croft were already rather inebriated at the student union bar when they decide to start their own game studio. Somehow, this decision remained even after their hangovers had passed, and they quickly established themselves as a company, focusing primarily on Flash games, and working of conversions of popular games including Bejeweled and Bubble Bobble. The studio had its ups and downs. Not every game was a big success, but Mediatonic’s batting average was solid, and they grew to a healthy size over the next ten years.
As the team began searching for their next game project, Jeff Tanton assigned designer Joe Walsh to write up a pitch for a new game. As he was working on it, something clicked inside Joe’s head, and he ditched the work he was supposed to be doing in favour of something he was forbidden from doing. He wrote a pitch for a Battle Royale game. Joe’s mind was swimming with thoughts of games such as Takashi’s Castle and Total Wipeout. Wouldn’t it be cool to play a game where dozens of players raced to complete a comedy obstacle course? Even though this was the exact opposite of what he had been expecting, Jeff couldn’t help but instantly fall in love with Joe’s idea. From the moment he read the brief pitch for the game, then titled Fool’s Gauntlet, he knew it was something special. He immediately forwarded it to one of the studio’s founders. No explanation. No further pitch. Here was an idea that Joe had come up with and it looked great. The problem was that Mediatonic didn’t have the resources to build a game of this scope. They’d need investors, but for all that everyone loved Joe’s raw idea, would they be able to convince a publisher to take a chance on this untested game concept? Jeff put together a formal pitch presentation, and while he shopped the game around to around ten publishers, he figured the best possible choice was Devolver Digital. Mediatonic already had a great working relationship with the team at Devolver thanks to work on previous titles such as Hateful Boyfriend. So how, without much in the way of actual gameplay footage, could Jeff communicate the nature of Fall Guys to Devolver? Simple: he filled his presentation with gifs from Takashi’s castle. Slapstick clips of contestants running into walls, falling off platforms, and completely failing to vault over obstacles. This was Fall Guys. This was the game that Mediatonic wanted to make.
Unsurprisingly, Devolver Digital leapt atthe chance to be involved with the project. The game quickly picked up steam, but even as development drew to a close, nobody at Mediatonic or Devolver were really sure the game would sell. After all, the Battle Royale genre had only become more oversaturated while they’d been working on the game. It didn’t help that Mediatonic literally couldn’t get enough people to test the game on PlayStation 4. Sony would only let them give out a certain number of beta codes, so matchmaking for a 60 player race was all but impossible. This was a painful glimpse at what might happen should the game fail to attract attention. Thankfully, a deal with Sony made sure that Fall Guys would definitely have a large install base at launch. Fall Guys would be free for all PlayStation Plus subscribers, meaning that, no matter what, a lot of people would be playing itwhen the game first debuted. Thus, with hordes of players, the game proved popular. Fall Guys very quickly took over the internet, with streamers on Twitch particularly enjoying the game, and thus, helping it to spread further. The moral of the story is that sometimes, you’ve got to break the rules. It was not smart to make Fall Guys. The smart move would have been to avoid this genre of game altogether. Sometimes, though, it’s okay to take a risk, to do something that might not work out. Sure, falling down can hurt, but with the right attitude, even making mistakes can be a lot of fun.
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